Let's Talk Recordings (and Listen to Some) by Thomas Wolf
Ever thought of creating a playlist of favorite classical music recordings? I have been doing so over the last few months in connection with a new project I am working on and I am learning a lot.
Let me start with a confession. I rarely listen to recordings except in conjunction with my professional musical activities. Unlike some people, I do not have music going in the background when I am relaxing or when I am driving or making a meal in the kitchen. Recordings for me have, for many decades, been primarily about work—judging a recorded performance (sometimes my own) for possible broadcast, listening to a recording when I am learning a new piece of music, assessing the recording of a colleague, or reviewing a recording in order to write or lecture about it.
As a teenager, I listened to recordings incessantly. There was rarely a time, given the opportunity when I was awake and by myself, that I didn’t have a record going and I often listened with friends. I was an avid collector, sometimes buying multiple recordings of the same piece, played by different performers. At the time, I could never understand my grandmother Lea Luboshutz’s bias against recordings. She simply did not approve of them, although she had made a few in the early years of the twentieth century. One of them is a rare 1909 record pictured here that I was able to acquire a few years ago that includes works by Cui and Arensky. Ultimately, she decided that the medium was not for her. While it in no way hurt her career when she was living, it did hurt her legacy as a performer after her death. Future generations simply had no way of familiarizing themselves with her playing.
Her opinions were partly understandable given the inferior sound of recordings (especially during her most productive years as a soloist). But she also objected to the very notion of someone listening to the same performance over and over again. A live performance was a unique experience, she said—an adventure and a journey shared between artist and listener only once. That is what made it special.
In time, I came to agree with her. For example, I was raised on Beethoven symphonies conducted by Otto Klemperer—famous for their slow, deliberate tempos. I listened to them over and over again until they were part of my bloodstream. Then I listened to recordings conducted by Arturo Toscanini and was shocked. The tempos were so much faster and for a long time I hated them. It took years for me to undo the Klemperer recordings from my memory bank so I could listen afresh to Toscanini and be bowled over by the different insights he brought to the pieces.
Perhaps the defining moment for me was when I went to a concert at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia where Nathan Milstein was guest soloist with the Orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. My standard for that piece had always been the recording by David Oistrakh with a very different interpretation. I remember talking to my mother after the concert and telling her how I hated Milstein’s performance and how much more I preferred Oistrakh’s. Knowing that my mother revered Oistrakh, I thought she would agree. Far from it. She was actually angry. “If you can’t be open to more than one interpretation, I feel sorry for you. That was a beautiful concert.” And of course, she was right.
My grandmother’s brother, my great uncle Pierre Luboshutz, did not share his sister’s view. He began making recordings in Russia as an assisting pianist to many of the leading soloists of the day. There are some notable ones with Serge Koussevitzky as a double bass soloist, for example, which have been reissued on CD. After leaving Russia, he continued to record. I recently came across an early recording with soprano Hulda Lashanska singing Tchaikovsky’s “None But the Lonely Heart” in German, recorded in 1931, that has also been reissued on CD. But it was even later in this country that Pierre recorded in earnest with his wife, Genia Nemenoff, as a duo-piano team Luboshutz and Nemenoff (as the team was called). Of their many wonderful recordings, I own about a dozen, including the one pictured below.
Pierre and Genia were simply much more practical than Lea. Whatever they may have felt about the purity of the recording experience for the listener, they understood how valuable records could be in advancing careers. And from a monetary point of view, in mid-twentieth century America, recordings could add considerably to performers’ incomes (in stark contrast to today when most classical musicians realize virtually nothing from recordings).
The Luboshutz & Nemenoff records were significantly different from those that my grandmother had made a half century earlier. Hers were recorded under challenging conditions with primitive technology and in one “take” (as it is called). You either used the result of that single performance or you discarded it. And once you made the recording, the machinery that allowed you to review it was also often quite primitive – of the wind-up variety where the speed of the twirling disk could vary depending on the pressure of the spring mechanism. Here, for example, is Lea Luboshutz’s 1909 recording of David Popper’s “Elfentanz” (“Dance of the Elves,”) Op.39 (arranged for violin and piano by Karl Halir).
Knowledgeable independent critics have called the playing remarkable. Yet for a long time I have been reluctant to put it out publicly for fear that people accustomed to today’s recording standards and performing practices would consider her playing inferior.
Pierre and Genia’s recordings were of much higher sound quality. They were made in a recording studio with multiple microphones utilizing technology that had advanced considerably. The resulting “performances” that were made available to the listener were the product of numerous “takes,” portions of the best of which could be spliced together to make the totality nearly perfect. Here for example is their recording of “The Bat”—Pierre’s arrangement of tunes from the Strauss opera “Die Fledermaus.”
[NOTE: For this and all subsequent recordings posted below I have provided Youtube links. Some links may begin with a brief advertisement which can often be skipped. Do be patient though as the recordings are worth listening to.]
Pierre and Genia’s recording of “The Bat” is an early example of a long-playing stereophonic disc (indeed, if you listen carefully you can hear the separation of the two pianos between the right and left speakers) and it was considered state-of-the-art production at the time (probably in the mid 1950s).
In recent days, I have been listening to a lot of recordings once again in connection with my writing about my musical family. The new writing project will include links to lots of recorded music. I have written fifty family stories, each connected to a favorite musical “encore” (works that would be played at the end of a concert when the audience demanded more than what was on the printed program).
Some of the recordings I have reviewed and included are by family members (including the two referenced above). Others are by great musicians of the past who were friends and colleagues of the family, including violinists like Fritz Kreisler, Efrem Zimbalist, and David Oistrakh. Still others are recordings that have been made more recently. I have had to balance many things. First, of course, is the music itself. I knew what pieces I wanted to include and except for a couple of them, there were excellent recordings available. But how to choose? In many cases there were fifteen or twenty choices. Most important to me was musicianship and I was willing to sacrifice audio quality for what I considered superb and interesting playing.
One of the pieces I include is Tchaikovsky’s Melodie, Op. 42, No. 3 from Memory of a dear place. The legendary violinist, Leopold Auer, made a recording of this piece in 1920 that can be heard here.
I find this recording remarkable and very moving. But I will not be including it in my playlist. Not only is the audio quality poor, but the playing style is so “old school” that a modern listener could very well interpret it as mediocre or even irritating. The excessive tempo changes, the “slides” (where the player’s finger literally slides up and down the string rather than landing on a pure note), the willingness of the player to sit on a note seemingly forever before continuing a phrase—all of this and much more speaks of another era of playing. Compare it for example with this later version of the piece by Auer’s student, Jascha Heifetz which retains some of Auer’s practices but is much more up-to-date stylistically.
Today there are many other versions one can find that are faster, the phrasing is “straighter,” and everything is clean and perfect, not to mention the superior audio quality. For most people, this is what is now expected from a recording. But as someone who is partial to the older recordings said to me, “The modern recordings rarely tear your heart out like the old ones do. Much of the emotion and expressivity is gone.” You see why it is so difficult to choose among recordings.
Many of the earliest recordings I considered were more like live performances given that they were rarely the result of the splicing together of multiple performances. Of course, the audio is less advanced than with today’s recordings and some of these single-take recordings include wrong notes, just as live performances often do. But that doesn’t bother me if the artistry is wonderful. For example, I considered an array of recordings by the magnificent pianist Josef Hofmann who was my grandmother’s close colleague and possibly also her lover.
There was a remarkable one from 1922 of Franz Liszt’s LaCapanella, a piece I knew I wanted to include on my playlist and you can hear Hofmann’s recording here. For some listeners, the inferior sound quality of this recording simply makes it unacceptable as something to listen to and enjoy. For them, a more recent recording, this one by Lang Lang, would be far preferable.
Which one would you choose?
Another issue I had to deal with was “authenticity.” Some of the earliest recordings are not of complete pieces because the music had to fit onto a single side of a disk that spun at a fast speed and therefore had fewer minutes of available playing time. One of these was Josef Hofmann’s remarkable recording of Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso. The recording, made in 1922, can be heard here.
The recording lasts only three minutes and 41 seconds (just a bit more than half of the Rondo’s usual length), so it is far from complete, missing, for example, the entire opening slow section. It is more like a snapshot. Given the modern expectation for completeness in which cuts of any length of the music of a masterwork are frowned upon, it would be heresy for me to represent this as a fair presentation of the Mendelssohn work. Here is the piece complete as played by Claudio Arrau – a wonderful performance and a far safer choice.
It is sad that the trend toward authenticity/completeness (or what one might call “purity”) precludes the presentation of recordings like Hofmann’s in the example above. I mentioned the problem to the renowned Hofmann scholar Gregor Benko recently and this was his response:
Each historic recording is an artifact of its time, not ours. Using that kind of purist logic, should we refrain from presenting photos and translations of Dead Sea scrolls because parts of the text are eaten away? And I for one would like to jettison a lot of purist dogma anyway, on general and specific principles. Music is not an exercise in purity. Beethoven himself would be astonished at what we believe now. His concerts featured isolated movements, stunts like playing the piano with your back to the keys, the violin held upside down, etc. He would be staggered to think anyone played all his sonatas in concerts one after the other. One of the big things that is killing classical music is that it became boring when it replaced going to church – people now go to concerts because they feel they have to, to demonstrate their cultural bona fides and their purity. Two hours spent being bored at a concert has replaced two hours of being bored in church for many. After each is over, participants leave feeling they are better than other people who didn’t attend. Just like church. I’m sure Beethoven and Mahler intended their music to be the occasion of Dionysian ecstasy, not bored churchiness.
There was one other issue I had to contend with in the selection process and it was an important one. I had to make sure that the “rights” associated with a particular recording allowed me to legally link to it in anything I would later publish. Suffice it to say that “rights” associated with recordings can be complicated, thorny, and often unclear, especially with older recordings. How does one even determine “rights” connected to a fifty-year-old recording when the record company that made it went out of business years ago? “Rights” become even more complicated if a contemporary composer or arranger is involved.
With all these considerations taken into account, I am very pleased with my final “playlist” as it is developing. In time, I will be sharing it more widely.
In ending this blog post, I want to leave you with two very different versions of Fritz Kreisler’s marvelous Praeludium and Allegro for Violin while I am still in the process of unscrambling rights issues. The first recording presented here is as Kreisler originally wrote the work with piano accompaniment. The second is a more recent version in an arrangement for violin and orchestra performed by my friend and colleague Peter Zazofsky. The tempos of the second are much more deliberate, giving the orchestra a far more prominent role than the piano. I love both versions.